I am continuing to work on Middle Ground without being funded. This does not bother me because my current work load with regards to Middle Ground is so light. I do feel, however, that I am not able to do as much as I would like because of my lack of funding. For example, I cannot properly travel unil I find out how to get compensation.
I feel I am forever stuck in the land of the brainstorm. Great things I would like to start doing that I can't because of logistics.
What have I brainstormed this week.
1. Disregarding my feeling towards feminism, I am taking an introduction to woman writers course. Exciting news! There is a whole section of the course devoted to Native American woman writers. Selections for the course include works by Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, and Linda Hogan. Very, very easy research. This also reminded me: I need to come up with a very specific reading list for the semester. Look for that in the next week.
2. The first essay we are reading is by Virginia Woolf. I haven't read her since I was 15 or 16 and am interested in seeing how my own identity as a "woman writer" has changed. Who am I now? At 15, or was it 16, I felt like V.W. failed somewhat in her asserations, although I cannot presently remember just what those assertions were.
I learned today that VW held her own salons as a young woman in London. Bohemians talking loosely about everyone. I would like to have my a couple of my own salons to use as a research method. I would invite various mixtures of poeple over, provide eats and then let them cut loose on some of the topics I hope to address with this project.
In other news, I am more tired then tired. I go and go, I am a as fuel as efficent as a Yaris. My biggest fear is that I am losing myself under my work load. Who will I be come December? Where is my courage, my heart, and my brain? I am straw, I am metal, I am fur. I really cling to any taste of my former lackidasical self. I find myself in moments of eating sushi, in a kiss on my stomach from a boyfriend, or a good scarf. I find myself in my laughter. The kind that doesn't come from my increasingly forced jokes.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Dust
Going back to the source.
Having trapezed across campus for over a month now trying to get my grant funding figured out, I may actually have a solution.
Basically, I went to NAU Human Relations last week. Here's what they told me: We can't help you. Contact the financial aid office.
Who, as I expected, had never heard of the HURA award.
In addition, HR told me that they could not confirm my present NAU employment without first having contact with the Lumberjack. I then started out to fill out a New Hire application, my fourth, if memory serves.
Luckily, and I write this in the Lumberjack office, I should be able to get the my ambiguity as an employee squared away by Monday evening at the LJ's first ED Board meeting.
I will also probably finish filling out that new hire information.
*
Life feels a bit like camping with my father.
When I was young we would head out after dark. After we had eaten "pocket stews", potatoes, groundbeef, and bell peppers baking over a campfire in tinfoil.
We would head out on foot or in my father's Toyota Forerunner, which exists in my mind, a far off white beacon at the end of our many hikes.
If we head by foot, my father would often stop and attempt to call in owls.
But right now I feel more like those excursions. in the Forerunner. My father would take his spotlight and shine its yellow light out the window of the car and we would the dust swirl in front of us as we drove, very slowly, hoping for an animal that might dart out in front of us.
I feel like that. All night and wind, and one spotlight, a glaring metaphor, shining through the kicked up dust and sand.
Having trapezed across campus for over a month now trying to get my grant funding figured out, I may actually have a solution.
Basically, I went to NAU Human Relations last week. Here's what they told me: We can't help you. Contact the financial aid office.
Who, as I expected, had never heard of the HURA award.
In addition, HR told me that they could not confirm my present NAU employment without first having contact with the Lumberjack. I then started out to fill out a New Hire application, my fourth, if memory serves.
Luckily, and I write this in the Lumberjack office, I should be able to get the my ambiguity as an employee squared away by Monday evening at the LJ's first ED Board meeting.
I will also probably finish filling out that new hire information.
*
Life feels a bit like camping with my father.
When I was young we would head out after dark. After we had eaten "pocket stews", potatoes, groundbeef, and bell peppers baking over a campfire in tinfoil.
We would head out on foot or in my father's Toyota Forerunner, which exists in my mind, a far off white beacon at the end of our many hikes.
If we head by foot, my father would often stop and attempt to call in owls.
But right now I feel more like those excursions. in the Forerunner. My father would take his spotlight and shine its yellow light out the window of the car and we would the dust swirl in front of us as we drove, very slowly, hoping for an animal that might dart out in front of us.
I feel like that. All night and wind, and one spotlight, a glaring metaphor, shining through the kicked up dust and sand.
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Braincloud
The clouds part, and behold! A Blog post.
Seems like "middle-ground" is no ground, or at least, no where to be found.
What haev I been working on, exactly? Alot of brainstorming. My brain is a storm.
1.After what seemed to be a miraculous, Lazarus like healing by my Laptop, the thing broke again last Sunday. It appears to be the 8 month problem of a bum charger cord. I am getting a new one as soon as I get paid Friday. Blog will bemore frequent. As many as three times a week, or with multiple posting in one day.
2. I will head down to Kayenta, (Or elsewhere on the Rez) every second thursday of the month. I will spend Fridays in the schools. See what I will be doing below.
3. I started to think about the student assemblies my elementary eduacation was pepper with. I have theorized that I could probably get permission to have such an assembly. Even, possibly on in the S.A.C. center, but more likely, I will present in teacher's classrooms. I know quite a few teachers who probably wouldn't mind if I took twenty minutes out of their class time in order to present my project. And what will I say? I don't neccesarilly want to talk at kids, I want to talk with them. If I aim to truly capture a portrait of you native culture, while at the same time examining my own culture, I need to talk with these kids. I want to hear about the music they like, where they shop, what they think of their grandparents, and what they eat for breakfast.
4. Playing off the idea of above, I have started to think aboiut interviewing groups of three or four at a time. Interaction.
5. If iam interviewing minors, if I am asking to interview minors I will most likely need to get permission slips. I could e-mail copies to the teachers whose classrooms I might be presenting to before hand and they could get them filled up and I could interview people at lunch.
6/. I need to e-mail the entire school district.
Seems like "middle-ground" is no ground, or at least, no where to be found.
What haev I been working on, exactly? Alot of brainstorming. My brain is a storm.
1.After what seemed to be a miraculous, Lazarus like healing by my Laptop, the thing broke again last Sunday. It appears to be the 8 month problem of a bum charger cord. I am getting a new one as soon as I get paid Friday. Blog will bemore frequent. As many as three times a week, or with multiple posting in one day.
2. I will head down to Kayenta, (Or elsewhere on the Rez) every second thursday of the month. I will spend Fridays in the schools. See what I will be doing below.
3. I started to think about the student assemblies my elementary eduacation was pepper with. I have theorized that I could probably get permission to have such an assembly. Even, possibly on in the S.A.C. center, but more likely, I will present in teacher's classrooms. I know quite a few teachers who probably wouldn't mind if I took twenty minutes out of their class time in order to present my project. And what will I say? I don't neccesarilly want to talk at kids, I want to talk with them. If I aim to truly capture a portrait of you native culture, while at the same time examining my own culture, I need to talk with these kids. I want to hear about the music they like, where they shop, what they think of their grandparents, and what they eat for breakfast.
4. Playing off the idea of above, I have started to think aboiut interviewing groups of three or four at a time. Interaction.
5. If iam interviewing minors, if I am asking to interview minors I will most likely need to get permission slips. I could e-mail copies to the teachers whose classrooms I might be presenting to before hand and they could get them filled up and I could interview people at lunch.
6/. I need to e-mail the entire school district.
Thursday, August 7, 2008
update
Three posting for this blog is shameful. And I am unhappy that my internet is still not up and running...
My equipment came in though, which is good.
My equipment came in though, which is good.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
Fences or Nothing New
I have spent the past three days being officially employed by Flagstaff Medical Center. I spent to sitting all day in orientation and one grueling day serving, well, gruel.
I have alot of personal concerns regarding this recent job choice, mostly with regards to my personal strength and willingness. But one thing i noticed immediately.
I am one of the only Anglos holding this postion. Further more, as far as i can tell, I am the only Anglo my age, who is enrolled in college, at this job. Aside from the pay, which, compared with most jobs available, is generous, I have no actual stake in this job. One of the reasons I stuck with my equally grueling food service job for so long was because it infalted my ego.
Almost the entire staff I work with is Navajo, ranging from girls around my age to woman in their sixties.
A confession: When I am in a new situation and I see a Navajo I have a tendency to want to really really really talk to that person. I feel this instant kinship and draw.
I watched two of my new coworkers put fruit in a blender today to make sorbet or a smoothie, and they were chattering and talking with that Navajo repor and I really wanted to join them.
In my interview, my boss made the comment that I would probably never be boring because I had "grown up on the Rez."
I have never felt more invisible then today. Perhaps, this is because the hospital is a huge business with who knows how many employees. Perhaps it is because I am once again doing a completely diserable job, cleaning up undisireable objects, only this time I don't have the advantage of being related to fine dining. I found that very few people made eye contact with me today. In and out of the kitchen.
More frustrating then the distance I felt from many of the hospital employees was the distance I felt from the staff. Like with the pair blendling fruit, I wanted, very badly to shout "Hey, hey! I grew up on the Rez.!"
I often feel that when this little tidbit is disclosed then I instantly earn a little, well, street cred. In both cultures.
This raises a few questions:
Do I use being from the Rez? To I use it to gain equality with a Navajo coworker? To stick out from a Anglo crowd?
In Orientation we actually had to hear the hospital interpreter speak on the cultural sensitivity with regard to Navajo patients. I am not sure what I can or cannot disclose, due to confidentionality, but I will say that I the audience was very sensitive, very curious, and for the most part, entirely uninformed. Some questions I heard:
"Do I shake ALL their hands? Sould I not shake the men's hands if it's a matriarical society?"
"Why don't they like eye contact?"
"Can you say that 'yah-ta-hay' word again?"
I'm not sure where all this is going, but, I still felt a distance between employees, and, as if this was new, I was again agog at the lack of information about the tribe in Anglo culture.
I have alot of personal concerns regarding this recent job choice, mostly with regards to my personal strength and willingness. But one thing i noticed immediately.
I am one of the only Anglos holding this postion. Further more, as far as i can tell, I am the only Anglo my age, who is enrolled in college, at this job. Aside from the pay, which, compared with most jobs available, is generous, I have no actual stake in this job. One of the reasons I stuck with my equally grueling food service job for so long was because it infalted my ego.
Almost the entire staff I work with is Navajo, ranging from girls around my age to woman in their sixties.
A confession: When I am in a new situation and I see a Navajo I have a tendency to want to really really really talk to that person. I feel this instant kinship and draw.
I watched two of my new coworkers put fruit in a blender today to make sorbet or a smoothie, and they were chattering and talking with that Navajo repor and I really wanted to join them.
In my interview, my boss made the comment that I would probably never be boring because I had "grown up on the Rez."
I have never felt more invisible then today. Perhaps, this is because the hospital is a huge business with who knows how many employees. Perhaps it is because I am once again doing a completely diserable job, cleaning up undisireable objects, only this time I don't have the advantage of being related to fine dining. I found that very few people made eye contact with me today. In and out of the kitchen.
More frustrating then the distance I felt from many of the hospital employees was the distance I felt from the staff. Like with the pair blendling fruit, I wanted, very badly to shout "Hey, hey! I grew up on the Rez.!"
I often feel that when this little tidbit is disclosed then I instantly earn a little, well, street cred. In both cultures.
This raises a few questions:
Do I use being from the Rez? To I use it to gain equality with a Navajo coworker? To stick out from a Anglo crowd?
In Orientation we actually had to hear the hospital interpreter speak on the cultural sensitivity with regard to Navajo patients. I am not sure what I can or cannot disclose, due to confidentionality, but I will say that I the audience was very sensitive, very curious, and for the most part, entirely uninformed. Some questions I heard:
"Do I shake ALL their hands? Sould I not shake the men's hands if it's a matriarical society?"
"Why don't they like eye contact?"
"Can you say that 'yah-ta-hay' word again?"
I'm not sure where all this is going, but, I still felt a distance between employees, and, as if this was new, I was again agog at the lack of information about the tribe in Anglo culture.
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Scrambled
Sifting through the war zone of my hard drive trying to find my HURA proposal.
Found my timeline, and I am on schedule.
Gorgeous recording equipent on the way. I ordered a remarkable device that allows me to record phone conversations. Behold, I am Dick Cheny.
Fodder:
Hiked today and saw a few horned toads today. The word for horned toad in navajo is the same word for grandfather. All of my friends referred to the horned toad as their grandfather.
The night my parent marriage officially distingrated I kept a horned toad in a red and purple satin pouch. I carried that reptile around for twenty-four hours, by the light of the flashing police sirens and the closet where I hid. I slept to the repile on someone else's sofa because my mother wouldn't let me be at home. I stayed in a sticky trailer.
The little toad died shortly before my mother came over and I walked down the steps to that trailer and asked her if there was going to be a divorce.
His little brown body shrivled up inside that soft little bag.
I see potential.
P/S I need to find a really good navajo-to-english dictionary.
Found my timeline, and I am on schedule.
Gorgeous recording equipent on the way. I ordered a remarkable device that allows me to record phone conversations. Behold, I am Dick Cheny.
Fodder:
Hiked today and saw a few horned toads today. The word for horned toad in navajo is the same word for grandfather. All of my friends referred to the horned toad as their grandfather.
The night my parent marriage officially distingrated I kept a horned toad in a red and purple satin pouch. I carried that reptile around for twenty-four hours, by the light of the flashing police sirens and the closet where I hid. I slept to the repile on someone else's sofa because my mother wouldn't let me be at home. I stayed in a sticky trailer.
The little toad died shortly before my mother came over and I walked down the steps to that trailer and asked her if there was going to be a divorce.
His little brown body shrivled up inside that soft little bag.
I see potential.
P/S I need to find a really good navajo-to-english dictionary.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
First Posting
Finally got the blog up and running. This week has been plagued with logisical failures, big and small, personal and whatever is the opposite of that.
Failures of Importance:
Payroll for this project
My laptop is dead. (I have been doing work at Klein)
The internet at my apartment is down as my older sister neglected to pay our cable bill for two months.
Basically, my essays and stories in transit are, as of now, stranded on my uncharged laptop. I am wondering if it would be possible to order a new charging cord using the HURA Funding, or if that would be ill advised.
Met with Beverly Cleland at the English Department about an hour ago in order to order equipment. I'll hopefully be putting an order for a voice recorder of some kind. To digital or not to digital?
Otherwise, I am pleased with the formatting of this blog thus far. The Newsreel is particualr snazzy. It should be noted that the picture that is heading this blog was found on a website that featured photogrpahs of global poverty. I believe the picture was taken somewhere out near Mounument Valley.
I will try to update this a couple times a day, if only to keep myself up to date. I'll add some relevant links this afternoon.
Failures of Importance:
Payroll for this project
My laptop is dead. (I have been doing work at Klein)
The internet at my apartment is down as my older sister neglected to pay our cable bill for two months.
Basically, my essays and stories in transit are, as of now, stranded on my uncharged laptop. I am wondering if it would be possible to order a new charging cord using the HURA Funding, or if that would be ill advised.
Met with Beverly Cleland at the English Department about an hour ago in order to order equipment. I'll hopefully be putting an order for a voice recorder of some kind. To digital or not to digital?
Otherwise, I am pleased with the formatting of this blog thus far. The Newsreel is particualr snazzy. It should be noted that the picture that is heading this blog was found on a website that featured photogrpahs of global poverty. I believe the picture was taken somewhere out near Mounument Valley.
I will try to update this a couple times a day, if only to keep myself up to date. I'll add some relevant links this afternoon.
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